1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods and servers consistent with the disclosure provided herein relate to providing a social networking service. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method for providing social networking service to enable various social relations to be built among people on the worldwide web (i.e. Internet) and a service providing server applying the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Social networking services such as blogs, chat rooms, online communities, social networking sites, etc. are dominating the web. Among these, the social media and social networking services including personal blogs, on-line communities, Facebook, Twitter, Witty are Web 2.0 main stream services.
With regard to the development of the social networking service, much research has been conducted to study potential social relations among users based on the links among the users such as citations, trackbacks or comments.
Two of these research efforts will be explained below. One research study is about user discovery (Shin, Xu, and Kim 2008; Nauerz and Groh 2007; Java et al. 2006; Agarwal et al. 2008; Java et al. 2006) (hereafter “Shin”), and the other research study is about social network construction (Furukawa, Matsue, and Ohmukai 2007; Karamon, Matsuo, and Ishizuka 2008; Lin et al. 2006; Nauerz and Groh 2007) (hereafter “Furukawa”).
Shin applies an approach to analyze and focus on connections and behaviors of the most-influential users on community or blog spheres, and Furukawa applies an approach to focus on a method for users to discover social networks.
As explained above, most research as a pre-condition is based on unilateral relations between users who make comments and users who post original texts. However, the above approach overlooks the fact that users often write arguments or comments within a comment thread many times, while those who post main texts are not included in the current comment thread context. In other words, while there are rather complicated relations among users who write comments and users who post original texts or users who comment on other comments, these are generally limited to unilateral connection. Accordingly, there is a need in the art to address the above-mentioned problems and extract potential social relations of the users.